A blog to help inspire organized resistance to the ALP's ill-advised, counter-productive and potentially totalitarian plan to impose mandatory ISP-based filtering on all residential internet feeds by default. This is *not* about the filth they are trying to block. This is about the Orwellian mechanism they are building to do it.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Stephen Conroy has stated: "Currently, some material is
banned and we are simply seeking to use technology to ensure those
bans are working."

I object to the principle that because something is illegal, it must
be blocked by technical means. We don't force drunk men in the
presence of scantily clad women to be chained to a pole because rape
is illegal. We prosecute actual transgressions of the law.

The idea that the Australian public is so perverted that, unless it is
physically prevented from doing so, it will become a habitual consumer
of child pornography is deeply offensive to me. The Australian Labor
Party may have individuals of this type, but I refuse to have this
standard applied to me as should other normal Australians.

yields 7 hits and one block.
I then wondered if I could work out what text was on the blocked page by trying various phrases that invoked the filter. Including:

"Kevin Rudd is a" site:org

This yielded several results and a block, so I substituted in text from a non-blocked site. Eventually, I found that this:

"Kevin Rudd is a bureaucratic" site:org

produces exactly one hit and one block.
Here is the full text of the non-blocked result:

A platoon of Aussie soldiers were patrolling north of Fallujah when they came upon
an Iraqi terrorist, badly injured and unconscious. On the opposite side of the road was an Australian soldier in a similar but less serious state.

The soldier was conscious and alert and as first aid was given to both men, the Platoon Leader asked the injured Australian what had happened. The soldier reported, 'I was heavily armed and moving north along the highway here, and coming south was a heavily armed insurgent.' We saw each other and both took cover in the ditches along the road. I yelled to him that Saddam Hussein was a miserable, lowlife scum bag who got what he deserved. He yelled back that Kevin Rudd is a bureaucratic, good-for-nothing, right wing labor dickhead who knows bugger all about running the country.'

'So I said that Osama Bin Ladin dresses like a frigid, mean-spirited lesbian and acts like one too!' He retaliated by yelling, 'Oh yeah? Well, so does Julia Gillard!'

'And so there we were, in the middle of the road, laughing and chatting away when a truck hit us.'

Searching for any phrase from that joke, causes Google to report a blocked result. Add the criteria: +conroy like so:

"Saddam Hussein was a miserable, lowlife scum" +conroy site:org

and Google reports that all results for this query are blocked.

The conclusion, therefore, is that Google's filter is blocking a site that contains a disparaging joke about Kevin Rudd and some reference to Stephen Conroy.

* Of course, the presence of a disparaging joke about Kevin Rudd is almost certainly not the reason Google is blocking the site, but the fact remains the site contains a disparaging joke about Kevin Rudd and it is being censored. Not a good look for a government wishing to impose a mandatory filtering regime on the country's Internet feeds.

** to duplicate this result you need to have disabled Google's strict content filtering in the preferences page of the Google search page.

*** since writing this post, Google's search engine is behaving differently on the less specific queries listed above. However, as of 20/10, this search still causes Google to report a blocked result.

site:org "Stephen Conroy" "Australian Politics" "Kevin Rudd"

**** As of 21/10, none of the above Google searches listed above yield an indication of a blocked result.

The Porn Report

Highly (though not universally) recommended as a serious attempt to understand the role of pornography in contemporary Australian society, one which debunks much of the moral panic surrounding the subject.

Commenting Rules

I reserve the right to remove comments, especially anonymous comments, which attempt to argue the position that possession of child porn should be legal.
This is not my position, and I do not wish my blog to be associated with that position. If others wish to defend this position they are welcome to do so, but they can do it elsewhere, not here.
Where I delete such comments, I will leave a stub to indicate that this has occurred.